As designers strive to improve the capabilities of new ICs, minimization of circuit size continues to be an underlying goal. Recent developments in IC design have dramatically increased the power, speed, and capability of the IC. As the power, speed, and capability of ICs increase, the number of input output terminals that each IC is interconnected with has also increased.
Normally, Integrated Circuits (ICs) are placed inside a “package” before they can be installed on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). IC Package Interconnect is the process of designing the electrical tracks between the terminals on the IC die and the pads on the package. Using Electronic Design Automatic (EDA) tools, the human designer takes net data from the IC die and footprint data from the PCB package. The designer then uses this data to design the electrical tracks within the package to connect the IC die to the substrate. Once these connections are made a connection is made to the package pins.
Only a few years ago, most packages had only a few dozen or at most a few hundred pads. The routing required to connect to these pads was not particularly difficult or time consuming. Modem Ball Grid Array (BGA) packages now routinely have hundreds or thousands of pads. Some have over ten thousand pads. A task that previously took a few hours can now take days or even weeks. Each step of the process that can be automated saves significant amounts of effort, thus reducing both time-to-market and time-to-volume. Thus, an automated solution is needed.
One approach is to use design tools which require a designer to manually determine each interconnect wire in an IC package. As the complexity of IC packages has increased, such a solution has obvious shortcomings. Various routing packages have also been developed to accomplish this task. These routers use all-angle auto routing with packaging-specific algorithms. They use a direct line-of-sight approach to solving the problems specific to BGA and CSP rather than traditional horizontal/vertical routing. While these other approaches are suitable for simple designs, they have difficulty providing routing solutions for complex ICs.
Although automated assignment based on pin locations is fast, it is not accurate. Normally, manual editing will be required before the design is fully routable. Currently, there was no method (manual and automated) that always produces a routable design. Furthermore with currently available systems, until routing is performed (either manually or automatically), it is impossible to discover some assignment problems. Therefore, what is needed is a technique that uses dynamic routing information rather than static placement information such that the system always produces a routable solution, if one exists. The desired system could also optimize the layout to produce the shortest total track length.
Therefore, it is highly desirable to provide an automated system and method to provide an optimal routing solution for highly complex IC packages.